Andrei Makine - Once Upon The River Love

I went up to my aunt, who was polishing the nuts of the switch system.

"I'm going off," I said, wrapping my hand around the lever.

"What's got into you? Without supper? Just as it's getting dark?"

"No, I've looked – it's only half past six…"

"But by the time you get to the Devil's Bend it'll be night… And besides, take a look at the sky: in an hour we'll have a real blizzard."

She wanted to stop me from going at all costs. Did she even have some kind of presentiment, derived from her acute intuition as a solitary and unhappy woman? She gave me all possible reasons.

"What about the wolves? You know it's not autumn now, when their bellies are full…"

"I've got my pike… and something to light a torch with."

Finally she mentioned the temptation that she thought irresistible:

"Don't you even want to wait for the Transsiberian?"

"No, not today," I replied, after a brief hesitation. "Besides, if it really starts to snow there's going to be a hell of a delay to the train."

"Yes, that's true," she agreed, seeing that nothing could stop me.

She slipped several poppy-seed biscuits into my pocket and offered me a box of matches – for all eventualities.

I grasped my pike – a long pole with a steel point. I gave my aunt a farewell wave. And I set off walking beside the track, ahead of the train in one of whose compartments was the unknown woman of my dreams. Who did not yet know that our rendezvous was not going to be kept…

The castellated ramparts of the taiga retained their look of happy abandonment and soft idleness. The curtain of snowy plumes enchanted the eye with its silent eddying. The start of a mild, wan evening… I had an intense feeling for its beauty and its aroused expectations!

In every movement of the air, woman was present. Nature was a woman! In the intoxicating giddiness of the great flakes as they caressed my face. In the long, languid calls of the jackdaws as they greeted the mild weather. In the heightened tawny color of the pine trunks beneath the damp luster of the melted hoarfrost.

The soft snow, the cries of the birds, the red bark… everything was woman. And not knowing how to express my desire for her, I suddenly uttered a terrible animal roar.

And panting heavily, I heard its long echo through the still warmth of the air, into the resounding secret depths of the taiga…

For a while I followed the metal track, walking on the ties. Then, when the rails were covered in ever-deepening snow, I put on my snowshoes and plunged into the forest. To take a shortcut. I decided to go to Kazhdai. I could no longer wait. I needed to know who I was right away. To make something of myself. To give myself a shape. To transform myself, to recast myself. To test myself. And, above all, to discover love. Outflank the beautiful traveler, that glittering woman from the West on the Transsiberian. Yes, before the train passed, I must implant into my heart and into my body that mysterious organ: love.

The town was immersed in the dismal daily routine of winter and seemed little inclined to share in my exaltation. Its streets quaked heavily as enormous trucks loaded with the long trunks of cedar trees drove through. Men appeared in the doorway of the only liquor store, thrusting bottles deep into their sheepskin coats. Women, their arms weighed down with shopping bags full of provisions, walked along ponderously, clad in the armor of their thick overcoats. The wind was whipping up and peppering their faces with snow crystals. They had no hands free to wipe them clean. They had to bow their foreheads and from time to time blow noisily, shaking their heads, like horses trying to drive away hornets. Between the men, eager to drown the traces of a hard day in a draft of vodka, and the women, advancing like icebreakers through the raging blizzard, no connection was imaginable. Two alien races. Furthermore, the wind must have caused a power failure. First one side of the street, then the other, was plunged into darkness. The women quickened their pace, gripping the handles of their bags. After a while they all looked so much alike that I thought I was seeing the same faces. As if they had got lost and were walking around and around in that dark town…

I, too, spent a good quarter of an hour wandering around under the white flurries, lacking the courage to approach the place where everything was to be acted out: that deserted wing of the station. The place where I could find the one I sought. I already knew what you had to do. I had seen it one day with Samurai. She was sitting at the end of a row of low varnished wooden seats, in that annex to the waiting room where no one was ever waiting for anybody. There was also a buffet, where an attendant, half asleep, shuffled the cups and the sandwiches with slices of shriveled cheese in them. And a newsstand with dusty display shelves, forever closed. And this woman, who from time to time got up and walked over to the timetable board and studied it with exaggerated attention. As if she were searching for some train known only to herself. Then she went and sat down again.

We had seen the man who took a seat beside her, showing her a creased five-ruble bill. We were in front of the newsstand, pretending to be absorbed in the covers of magazines several months old. We had heard their brief whispering. We had seen them go off. Her hair was a dull russet color and covered in an openwork woolen head scarf.

She was the one whom I now saw in the little deserted waiting room. I crossed the resonant space with tense steps, my boots making footmarks on the slippery tiles. She was there, on her seat. My terrified glance only took in the color of her hair. And the outline of her autumn coat, unbuttoned to show a necklace with two rows of red pearls.

I walked up to the closed newsstand. I examined the photo of the latest two cosmonauts, with their radiant smiles, then the smooth face of Brezhnev on another cover. There was no sound other than the creaking of the door in the adjoining main hall and the clink of glasses as the drowsy attendant arranged them in her buffet.

I stared at the shining faces of the cosmonauts without seeing them, but all my senses, like the antennae of an insect, were exploring the tenuous connection that was in the process of being forged between me and the red-haired woman. The dim air of that waiting room seemed to be wholly impregnated with the invisible matter formed by our two presences. The silence of this woman behind my back. Her feigned interest in the muffled loudspeaker announcements. Her real expectation. Her body beneath the chestnut coat. A body in which my desire was already making its habitation. The presence of a woman whom I was going to possess – who did not yet know it. And who was for me a singular and terrifying being in this universe of snow…

I detached myself with an effort from the magazine display rack and took several steps in her direction. But involuntarily my trajectory veered away, circled round the seats, and thrust me back in the direction of the main hall. With a thumping heart, I found myself again in front of the timetable board. The Transsiberian was posted there in large letters and several local trains in smaller ones.

I suddenly experienced a faint glimmer of that infinite sadness the red-haired prostitute must have experienced each evening before this board. The cities, the hours. Departures, arrivals. And always this unique Track One. Yes, all the strange trains she apparently missed week after week. She was forever getting up and consulting the timetables so attentively. She strained to hear every word of the croaking loudspeaker. And yet each train would depart without her…

Standing in front of the board, I summoned up all my strength before crossing the threshold of the little room. I checked if my shapka was on my head at a good angle – in an "adult" style, tilted toward one ear, with a few curls showing above my temples. In the cossack manner. In my pocket I fingered the note that had become damp from my burning palm. As unfortunately I had no five-ruble bill but only a three, wrapped around two ruble coins, I told myself there was a risk the Redhead would see this greenish three-ruble bundle and send me packing with a scornful little smile. Neither could I spread out all my treasure before her! And as for trying to change it for a single note, that would have given the game away immediately. Any of the sales assistants would easily have guessed, I thought, what these fateful five rubles were the price of.